Le Video, at 1231 9th Avenue between Irving and Lincoln -- and San Francisco's best video store since opening its doors in 1980 -- is on the verge of closing.
San Francisco is life, life is change, and that means San Francisco changes, especially the stuff that made it so cool when you arrived a decade or two ago. And when I arrived in 1994 to go to film school at SF State, Le Video was just about coolest thing I'd ever seen. (We laugh about the technology now, but the laserdisc selection just blew my mind.)
But that doesn't mean we can't fight the bad changes. And we should all fight to keep Le Video alive in one form or another.
California is a state full of contradictions.
When I visited the Real World set on Sutter Street at a press junket at the end of filming, one of the producers asked me to wait on the red sofa in the foyer, near the door. I settled in and tried to take in the scene. Though I didn't know it at the time, I was watching the cast members walk to and fro. There were so many people in the rooms it was hard to tell who were fellow journalists (Can we really call ourselves that when we are covering an MTV show? Whatevs.) and who were the Seven Strangers Picked To Live Together.
I saw Tom walk by and I assumed he would be the good looking asshole (I was wrong; he's actually a good-looking, generic, imperfect 21-year-old). Then I saw Cory saunter by, looking like a 'roid casualty, which he has pretty much lived up to on the show. Big-bosomed Jenny was sitting at the dining area table eating a bowl of cereal looking completely over the entire thing, not to mention way too "normal" for TV. She looked like someone you might have sat behind in tenth grade biology. But across from me, at a little table, was a petite, attractive brunette with a sweet face, talking to some older dude who obviously covered entertainment from some publication. I overheard snippets -- she was from somewhere back East, the experience here had been interesting, etc and so forth. She seemed confident and charming, the sort of girl you would hire to be your nanny for a summer.
The Write Stuff is a series of interview profiles conducted by Litseen, where authors give exclusive readings from their work.
Lemony Snicket (A.K.A. Daniel Handler) had an unusual education and a perplexing youth and now endures a despondent adulthood. His previous accounts and research have been collected and published as books, including those in A Series of Unfortunate Events, 13 Words, and The Composer Is Dead. "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" is the first title in his new, four-volume series, All the Wrong Questions.
Lisa Brown is the bestselling author and/or illustrator of a growing number of books for children, teens and new parents, including How to Be, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, and Baby Mix Me a Drink. Her 3 Panel Book Review cartoon ran in the book section of the San Francisco Chronicle. Lisa lives in San Francisco, California with her son and her husband, who is rumored to be Lemony Snicket.
What's your biggest struggle -- work or otherwise?
LB: Getting up in the morning.
DH: Getting my wife out of bed before 9.
If someone said I want to do what you do, what advice would you have for them?
DH: Get back to work, you.
